Gilles Garnier, the Werewolf of Dole

Sixteenth-century France had a serious case of werewolf panic. Did Garnier really transform into lupine form and attack and eat humans? Or were the gruesome deaths of several children merely the work of wild animals?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, Fun How
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson, and it's one
more Halloween episode. This is the last one for the
folks who were like, what where the Halloween episode? We've

(00:22):
had a lots now, uh, And this one is a
little bit gruesome and I feel like we need to
put a trigger warning on it. It pretty heavily features
some very serious violence against children. So if that's something
that you're not comfortable with, or if you have younger
listeners you would rather not have exposed to that, this
might be when you skip. Fortunately, we do have a
bad catalog of Halloween episodes from previous years, and many

(00:43):
of those are far lighter, fair like the History of
Halloween Candy, So perhaps hop over to one of those
instead if you still want a historical Halloween fix. But
think this one might be a little too intense because
today we're talking about werewolves, which may sound fun and light,
but this particular thing that we're talking about centers on
a series of very real attacks on children in France

(01:04):
in the late sixteenth century, So there is a bit
of horror involved some possible delusion and a cultural fear
that was so deep rooted that the people were willing
to accept fairly outlandish concepts as perfectly rational explanations for
events that were too troubling and upsetting to just leave
unresolved with no denimal to start off. There is a

(01:25):
real clinical state that's called clinical like anthropy, and this
is when somebody believes that they transform into a wolf.
This is a condition that's believed to be mostly a
unique expression of some other underlying conditions such as bipolar
disorder or schizophrenia or even really severe depression, so it's
not just something that happens in isolation without other underlying

(01:47):
psychological factors. Correct and the first recorded case of clinical
like anthropy was written up in France in eighteen fifty two,
and that particular case was about an asylum patient in
nul C, France, and this report describes a man who
was so completely convinced that he had turned into a wolf,
to the point that he believed his normal human teeth

(02:08):
had grown into those of a wolf, that his feet
had morphed into a semi cloven uh slash paw like state,
and that his body was covered in hair, and he
would when doctors came to examine him, you know, show
them these features. He would pull his lips back and
show them his wolf teeth, but of course doctors saw
only normal human body. Uh. And then he also insisted,

(02:31):
as part of this transition he believed, he believed he
had made, that he'd be only fed raw meat. France
in particular seems to be a hotbed of this condition,
and the most likely explanation is that at various points
in history there have been some very legitimate concerns about
wolf attacks and France. I know, people advocating for wolf
reintroductions today like to talk about there have never been

(02:55):
uh incidents of wolves attacking people. This was not the
case in early modern Europe at all, Like you need
to add in modern America at the then the end
of that sentence. Uh. So we've talked about this before,
actually in our Beast of Jeovden episode for example. So
there was a very lengthy period from the Middle Ages
through about the seventeenth century where wolves were basically public

(03:17):
enemy number one in France, and they were creatures of
great power and ferocity that were capable of just incredible carnage.
So it would make sense then that in some instances
people dealing with delusional mental conditions may feel themselves to
be in some way the ultimate evil or savage thing
that they could think of, which culturally in France at

(03:38):
this point had been wolves. And that is the case
during this point in France that we're talking about today
as well as Tracy just mentioned centuries on either side. Now,
in sixteenth century France, especially in rural areas, it was
unfortunately all too common for children to vanish or to
be attacked by predatory animals such as wolves. And not

(03:58):
long after the few to Saint Michelle inteen seventy two,
there was a young girl to have aged ten or
twelve who was attacked at the vineyard Deshastinois, and the
victim was strangled to death, strips of her flesh or
torn away from her arms and up her legs, And
initially it wasn't clear exactly what had happened. And then

(04:19):
we get to Gio Garnier. Uh. This is a man
who had for a long time been something of a loner.
He lived in a forest north of the city of dull.
He was originally from Lyon, which was not far away,
but far enough away that he was perceived to some
degree as a foreigner uh and he was nicknamed the
Hermit of Dull, although we should clarify that he was
not a hermit in the religious sense. He was merely

(04:39):
a man who lived on the fringes of society as
a recluse. But at some point Gille married a woman
named Apollonia, and we don't really know much about her
other than that the two of them lived in a
hermitage at Saint Bonald, near near Homage, and the winter
after Gill and Apollonia married was pretty really harsh. The

(05:01):
region where the city of Dull and the Seer Forest
where Gardnier lived, which is called uh Franche Compte, experienced
a very serious famine as a consequence of the lower
than normal temperatures, so he had no livestock or land
to support himself and and his bride still sort of
trying to figure out how exactly he found and married

(05:21):
this woman. The details on that are between scarce and
non existent, so scavenging through the winter was really just fruitless.
Day and night, he would wander the countryside. He was
often seen by farmers in the region looking progressively more
sickly and now before we get to the day when
desperation allegedly led Gio Gargnier to commit a truly horrific

(05:43):
act and several thereafter, should we pause for a moment
for a word from one of the great sponsors that
keeps the show going. So back to the story of
gil Gargnier. On that autumn day when the young girl
was killed in the vineyard that Tracy spoke of at
the beginning of the episode, it was allegedly Garden who
took her life, but as to whether he appeared as
a wolf, we do not know. There were no witnesses.

(06:05):
He did, however, after feeding there at the side of
the murder, according to the record, take some of the
girl's flesh home to also feed his hungry wife. Eight
days after that first attack, he stalked and killed another
girl in a meadow called Lach. This was near the
site where the first murder had taken place. This savage
event took place in the daytime in the late morning.

(06:28):
The girl was rudely torn apart and jeal according to
testimony that was given later, used his hands and his
teeth to kill her, and on this occasion Gardnier was
actually chased away by several witnesses before he could eat
any of his prey, and those witnesses would later testify
that at the time of the attack, when they came
upon this situation because they had heard the girl screaming,

(06:51):
Gardnier was indeed in his wolf form and he was
shredding the child with his claws because of his lupine appearance.
Though they could not identify the perpetrator or that they
had happened upon in this horrific event as Gil Garnier,
they just knew it was some were wolfie thing, but
they knew not who. This is not the first time,

(07:11):
for the only time in France when there was a
reports of a strange wolf being Yeah, like we said,
France was a hotbed for this whole situation. So another
week later and there was another attack. This time the
victim was a boy of approximately ten years old. The
boy had been walking in a vineyard named Gretzan when Garnier,

(07:34):
again allegedly in the form of wolf, set upon him,
and as with the first victim, the boy was strangled.
Flesh from the thighs, legs and belly of the child
was eaten, and then the boy's body was brutally dismembered.
Garnier or whoever the attacker was, tore a leg from
the corpse and carried it away, and in some accounts

(07:55):
you'll hear that both legs were taken. A fourth attack
took lay as the others, a week after the previous murder.
This time it was a boy who was twelve or thirteen,
was near the village of Peruse in the Chrome Chromony Parish,
and once again this victim was dragged into the woods.
The attacker seemed intent on eating him, but during this

(08:18):
fourth attack, the child's screams actually brought attention to what
was happening, and several people followed those screams into the woods,
and the arrival of these additional people frightened the hermit away,
and we're gonna call it that rather than the wolf,
for reasons it will be apparent momentarily. But unfortunately it
was too late to save the boy that had been attacked,

(08:38):
and the child was actually dead by the time help
reached him. So in this fourth attack, said to have
been perpetrated by Garnier, the witnesses who had come to
help this child they heard screaming, said that he was
most certainly not in the form of a wolf. He
was just a normal human person. And in the documentation

(08:59):
of this case is not only are the are the
attacks described as being the utmost and horrific villity, but
the fact that Garnier attacked and was planning to eat
the meat of the final victim on a Friday was
especially troubling. This is showed the religious practice of abstaining
from meat on that day, which is part of Catholic

(09:20):
observation that was being observed in the rest of the
community in the area. Yeah, this is like the really
damning thing. It's like, not only is he a werewolf,
he's doing it against our regular eating schedule of the church,
which seems very silly when we say it now, But
this was something taken very very seriously at the time,
and so as witnesses had seen and identified Garnier, he

(09:43):
was quickly taken into custody. This is another area of
the story where there are some variations in terms of
how he was arrested. So in some tellings it happened
on the site as a sort of citizens arrest, like
these witnesses had subdued him and and took him to
the authorities. Uh. And then in other verse as it
happens after the fact when the witnesses who had intervened
in the attack went to the authorities, and then they

(10:05):
sent out people to collect Garnier. Once Garnier was in custody,
things moved very very quickly. Uh. Enrica Mu was a
prosecutor in the case, and his full title was Doctor
of Laws, Counselor of our Lord the King in the
Supreme Court of the Parliament of dull and he served
specifically as prosecutor General and public prosecutor. In Garnier's very

(10:27):
very expedient trial. Fifty different witnesses came forward to testify
against Garnier. A lot of this, Uh, A lot of
this was really circumstantial. People described things like seeing a
wolf in the woods and then not long after also
seeing Garnier, So then they would conclude that those were
both the same person. Yeah. So even if you factor

(10:50):
in the witnesses in the two attacks where people came
to try to help the children involved, that was really
only a few people. And this was dozens of people
that were like, I did see wolf, and later that
same day I saw Gio Gargnier in the same spot.
It's clearly the same um which again in today's forensics

(11:10):
and the science sort of criminal investigation that would not fly.
But in a very fearful uh countryside in France, that
was certainly certainly adequate testimony. So for his part, Darnier
confessed to the attacks, acknowledging that indeed he did intend
to eat all of his victims. And according to his story,
as he was out looking for food one day, remember

(11:31):
this happened during a harsh winter when it was pretty
much scavenging in the forest to see what he could
put together in terms of consumable things to sustain himself
and his wife, Gill said that he meant a specter
in the woods, a ghost, but in human form, and
this apparition appeared to Gargnier and he told him that
he could help. The specter could give Gio Gargnier a

(11:52):
salve that would catalyze a transformation. But this mysterious ghost
could only teach the starving hermit how to metamorphose into
one animal, a wolf, a lion, or a leopard, because
a wolf made the most sense in the French countryside,
that was what he chose. He thought that in a

(12:13):
lupine form he would improve his odds at finding food
for himself and his wife, and some tellings of the
story it's also reported that he had children, but it's
unclear whether that's actually the case. According to his confession,
when he saw his first victim in the woods, he
was so hungry that he just gave over to his
newfound animal instincts. And this entire story, as outlandish as

(12:38):
it may sound, actually fit in very well with the
contemporary thinking at the time that were wolves were really
sort of similar to witches and that they had been
seduced by the devil or another demon, and so it
really made sense to people hearing this confession that Gio
Garnier had in fact traded his soul to the devil
for the power to save his family, possibly because I

(12:59):
just went to Salem and had a had a witch
tour conducted by listener Nancy. Thank you Nancy. The whole
time we're talking about this, I'm like, this sounds so
much like Salem witch trial events and the types of
evidence that we're allowed in the court. It really is.
If you read many books on werewolves in Europe, but

(13:20):
specifically France during this time, they talk about the werewolf hysteria,
and it parallels so closely to which trial hysteria in
terms of just people buying in like we've discussed without
real um evidence, but it just fits into their sort
of fears and schema in the moment culturally that it's

(13:43):
almost exactly the same. So on January eighteen three, Veille
Garnier was found guilty of both like anthropy and witchcraft.
And according to his sentence quote, the person of the
accused shall be handed over to the master executioner of
High just this and directing that he, the said gil Gagner,

(14:04):
shall be drawn upon a hurdle from this very place
unto the customary place of execution, and that by aforesaid
master executioner, he shall be burned quick and his body
reduced to ashes. He is moreover molded in the expenses
and costs of this suit. Yes, so basically he was

(14:24):
dragged from the place where the trial had taken place
to a stake where he was burned, and all of
the very few possessions that he actually had were seized
in an effort to cover the expenses of having had
this whole trial. A letter from Daniel Doge to Mathieu
Charmison who was the dean of the chapter of Says,

(14:45):
summarized the entire Gardnier cases follows quote this, Gio Gardnier,
the werewolf like a file, was a solitary who took
to himself a wife, and then, unable to find food
to support his family, fell upon such evil and impious
courses that, whilst wandering about one evening through the woods,
he made a pact with a phantom or spectral man,

(15:06):
whom he encountered in some remote and haunted spot. The
phantom deluded him with fine promises, and among other gouds,
eke taught him to become a wolf. A lion announced
just as he would list, only advising that since the
wolf was the least remarkable of savage beasts, the shape
would be the more comfortable. To this, he agreed and
received an unguent or salve, wherewith he anointed himself when

(15:30):
he went about to shift his shape. He died very penitent,
having made full confession of his crimes. Of course, the
key element that was omitted from that letter, and also
from most casual accounts of this whole incident, is that
Giel Garnier was tortured on the rack before he made
his confession on the off chance that you don't know

(15:50):
what rack torture involves. My person being tortured is fastened
to a frame that has rollers at one or both ends.
They're fastened by their wrist and their ankles, and then
a crank is used to turn these rollers and pull
at the person's body. Basically stretches the person's body and
just causes excruciating pain. And there have been a lot
of variations on designs for rack devices, including a French

(16:13):
one that added spikes on the rollers, and some are
angled set up so that the victim is disoriented in
addition to being just completely tortured. And we don't have
the specifics on the type of rack used to elicit
this confession from Gio Gagnier, but it is not difficult
to imagine that even after a short time, one might
want to confess all manner of things in order to

(16:34):
just make such an ordeal stop. In late fifteen seventy three,
still dealing with citizens fearing werewolf attacks and hoping to
combat the ongoing problems with like antherropy, despite Gil Garnier,
the purported werewolf, having been executed, the government of Dole
published a decree that werewolf hunting was legal and that

(16:57):
citizens were authorized to kill such a creature with no
fear of penalty or punishment. So pikes, hollbird's, muskets, and
sticks were all suggested as potential weapons to use for
werewolf hunting. I'm chuckling a little bit just because of
the idea of going after a werewolf with a stick, yeah,
or in fact just a regular wolf, which is probably

(17:18):
what was really the problem. Correct. Um, Yeah, it was
sort of this like really kind of desperate effort to
make the citizens feel a little bit empowered to sort
of take their safety into their own hands. I did
not go down the rabbit hole of finding out if
there were any sort of crazy and foolhardy efforts in

(17:40):
that arena, but I'm sure it would possibly uh foster
such things. The record of Gagnier's arrest, trial and judgment
was actually published the year after his death, in fifteen
seventy four, and it's that document that's primarily used today
to source information about the story. However, though it's considered
an official record and it does reference core proceedings, that

(18:03):
document is from another time when it was perfectly acceptable
to legitimately list being a werewolf as a crime, and
this document was also distributed in pamphlet form. It was
a means to educate and warn the public about the
dangers of Lugaru werewolves, so the unclouded reality of the
situation is not likely truly represented in this document. In

(18:24):
the early two thousand's, a study was made of Lass,
the massive forest of there to hunt for the remains
of Jail's Garnier's home. People did find the ruins of
a modest dwelling that did date the second half of
the sixteenth century, and despite the long told tale that
the reclusive Guarnier had taken pieces of his victims home

(18:47):
to his wife, there were no signs of human remains
found at that particular home, and the reality of the
story of the werewolf of Dog is that gil Garnier
was possibly mentally ill. He may have been a serial
killer and a cannibal who preyed on children and used
this werewolf story is a more palatable confession than the
idea that he was simply a ferocious human. Or he

(19:11):
may have used it as an attempt to try to
shift the blame in the case to the devil rather
than himself. If he did carry out the murders for
which he was tried. It's definitely incredibly horrific. It's clear
his victims probably all suffered terribly, but it's also entirely
possible that the attacks were in fact the work of

(19:32):
actual animal predators and that for some reason or another,
guarneer just felt compelled to take credit for them. And then,
as we said before, his confession was the result of torture.
So it's really hard to say whether that was the
truth or not, and whether Gio Garnier was experiencing delusions
or not, whether he was a serial killer or not.

(19:54):
He was used to some degree as a scapegoat in
a time where paranormal animals were very real fears to
village as in Europe, in the European countryside, he was
targeted as an outsider and sort of sacrifice to quell
the fears of a community about these unexplained attacks. And
even if he did kill the four children involved in
the case, there were other children that were killed by

(20:14):
animals during this period, and the execution of one man
was likely used in this instance to assure the community
that the evil had been apprehended, even though as we said,
attacks continued. So well, we know that we're werewolves are fictional.
We do not encourage the practice of accepting the the
power of werewolf transformation from strange spectral men in the woods. Yeah,

(20:40):
just turn that offer right down. Don't do it. So
if that happens, Uh, not only should you turn it down,
you should go someplace safe, get away from anyone weird
in the woods offering you freaky powers. I think that's
just a good life lesson. So with that, we wish
you all a happy Halloween, and we hope you have
a great and safe one and nothing nearly so scary

(21:00):
as this happens unless it is in a controlled haunted
house type environment and you know you're actually safe and
there are no murders happening. We don't want any of
that you have, listener, I do. It's not Halloween related,
but we have two pieces that are are very lovely.
And as I've mentioned before, I'm trying to do a
little bit more with our our physical mail that we get,
because we do get a lot of it, and we
often read emails, but sometimes it's very nice to read

(21:21):
the physical ones. So it's especially great for me because
as I am not in our office very often yeah,
I get to see them too. Yeah. I usually keeps
them in a little pile, and then I show out
a Tracy we have show and tel when she arrives.
Our first one is from our listener, Laurel uh And
I'm just going to read a little bit of it,
because most of her letter is actually really good suggestions.

(21:43):
But first I have to tell you that her penmanship
is really lovely. It looks as Tracy said, it looks
like a font. It looks like a font, And Laurel says,
I have listened to your show for a few years.
A while ago, I found this item and Edwardian underskirt
question mark in a pile of former holl Weeen costumes
that a co worker was throwing out. I knew I
had to save it, but I didn't know to whom

(22:04):
I could give it. You talked on the podcast about
liking historical costume, so perhaps you could find a use
for it. Laurel. That was so sweet of you, and
I do want to look into sort of how I
can best restore it. Some of the lace needs to
be reattached, and it needs a cleaning, but I want
to be gentle with it and not get too scrubby
and potentially harm the textile because it is a little
bit older, it's a little fragile, But it's so lovely

(22:25):
and such a sweet thought that I just wanted to
make sure we thank you on the air. Our next
letter is from our listener Claire, and I read it
and it was just so delightful that I wanted to
share it with our other listeners. She says, Dear Holly
and Tracy, thanks so much for the awesome podcast. I
listened to your recent podcast about gentleman's clothing through the
Ages with the interview with Jason Merrill, and I loved it.

(22:46):
The day after I listened to it, I saw a
fellow student at school wearing a waistcoat that was too
small for him, which I know drives Mr Meryll crazy. Also,
my tech ed teacher, Mr Meister, wears a bow tie
every single day. I'm sure he and Mr Merrill would
get along very Oh, thanks for the wonderful podcast. Thank
you for the wonderful letter, Claire. Yeah, I bet Jason
would get along with anybody that wears a bow tie

(23:06):
every day. And I love that, Uh you now recognize
when people's waistcoats don't fit properly. I noticed it a
lot more after talking to Jason. I mean, it's one
of those things I've always kind of noticed, but I
really notice it now. So I don't see people in
waistcoat it's very often now I must be hanging out
with a waistcoat to your crowd than you. If you

(23:31):
would like to write to us, you should absolutely do so.
You can email us at History Podcast at house works
dot com. We're on Facebook dot com slash mist in history.
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tumbler dot com. We're on Instagram at miss in history.
If you want to read a little bit more about
what we talked about today, you can go to our

(23:52):
parents site, house stuff Works. Type in the word werewolf
in the search bar, and you're going to get an
article written by none other than the fabulous Tracy V. Wilson.
I'd did write that, you did. It's how We're Wolves
work and it's quite a good read. If you would
like to visit us on the web, you can do
that at missed in history dot com, where you will
find all of the episodes there have ever been of
this show, as well as show notes from the period

(24:12):
that Tricy and I started on, and occasionally we'll also
add in another blog post and whatnot. I owe listeners
a few for various things I have asked them to
write in about, and I have not collated all of
my information to put those together, so that is my bad.
But it's coming, So comeing and visit us at missed
in history dot com and how stone works dot com

(24:35):
the law on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com.